As most in the Linux community know… DOSBOX is an emulator that creates a DOS environment with the primary function is to play old DOS games under Linux. A good idea, because there are a lot of good old DOS games out there.
However, it is a full DOS environment, even if lacking some of the bundled programs that make up DOS. However, most can be downloaded from the net. The end result is a quite good general purpose DOS emulator. I love it because it allows me to use some of my old DOS programs under Linux. I am easily fire up Turbo C++ or QBasic for writing some old code. Good practice at writing programs with all the easy help available to you. Something that a lot of modern IDE environments lack.
Of course, no serious programming is done in BASIC, but call me nostalgic and sometimes I just like playing around in the QBasic programming environment to see what unique processing algorithm I can develop. Of course, I could just as easily dust off my old 386SX and start it up, but that would be inconvenient for a number of reasons. 1. Where would I put it; 2. I have to replace the hard drive and 3. No networking or even a CD drive. So, yes that would be a project I should look into in the future. One of the main things about it is that I would like to see if I can get a good Flash solid state drive that would be IDE compatible with this old IDE specs of this system and would make the system much quieter and maybe a little faster. Of course DOS on this machine flies in any case. I used to run OS/2 Warp 3.0 on it. It has about 5MB of RAM, small by today’s standards but adequate for running Warp 3 on a 386.
Anyway… back to track… DOSBOX allows me to run all these old nifty programs, allowing me to keep old school and new school on the same machine. To see the old Norton Programmer’s Editor running again is great. In the old days, this was the Editor of choice if you were a programmer. Yes, there was other text editors but none anywhere close to this editor. Of course, you could have invested in an vi clone on DOS but, it would not be as small as NEDIT. NEDIT was great, as you can adapt it to any programming situation, including writing COBOL programs where you needed to start at particular character spacings for the program to be compiled properly, something that was not as easily implemented in other text editors.
Ok. I stop, as it seems that I am getting sidetracked with the nostalgia about my DOS programming days. So I just say, if you want a no problems DOS interface in this GUI world, DOSBOX might just be the ticket to get you back to good old dos, especially if you are not using Windows.